When seeing the band name Axe Dragger…I wonder why they did not choose the name Axe Dagger??? Anyway, you must scream in your highest power metal voice.. AXE DRAGGGGGEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!! From their bio: American heavy metal supergroup Axe Dragger (featuring current and former members of Fu Manchu, Pantera, Dark Funeral, and Pentagram) team up with Metal […]

After covering 2020s Old Old Death back in 2020, I missed 2023s Fandens Skall, Tulus’s 4th effort since reforming in 2007, after the band’s successful  Khold offshoot. As I stated in my review of Old Old Death, Tulus and Khold are/were essentially interchangeable in terms of sound and style; simple, cold, riff driven Norweigian black […]

It’s okay, Lamb of God. You changed your logo, and along with the artwork for the new album, Into Oblivion, it looks like an early 2000s Geocities website. Am I bitter about it? No, of course not. It’s not like a certain writer for this distinguished online tome has the LOG from Wrath tattooed on […]

I rather enjoy Italy’s Dusktone Records; they have a solid offering of symphonic black/death metal bands/releases (The Gloomy Radiance of the Moon, Voland, Obscura Qalma, Svartghast), that I enjoy, as well as a very solid stable of reissues and compilations (Einherjer, Stormlord, Aborym, Spite Extreme Wing, etc). The latest of their offerings that has caught […]

The social media algorithm did its thing with Unverkalt. I can’t recall exactly which app, but an ad popped up showing them. I saw the band photo and the fact they’re on Season of Mist, which naively led me to believe they are a symphonic metal band, which is usually not something up my alley, […]

Oh man! This brings back memories. I spent my formative years for music absorption in England circa 1990-1993. During that time I discovered Carcass, Bolt Thrower and so many other killer Death Metal bands that my brain was rotting from all the sickening gore I was exposing it to. I was also a Punk kid […]

Norway’s Bizarrekult are back with their third album, Alt som finnes, with the band remaining intact with Adv on drums, Bizarre on guitars, bass, vox, D on vocals, and Ignat Pomazkov on guitars. I reviewed their sophomore effort in 2023, Den tapte krigen, and I really enjoyed their approach to black metal as well as […]

Listen, I know I’m late on this one. I know it’s a pretty high-profile release from a revered band with a tragic backstory. But truth be told, I have not really heard much of this post-Windir act past 2006’s Pitch Black Brigade. In fact, I had no idea they were still active, let alone released an […]

Serpent Icon is a brand spanking new melodic death metal project (they aren’t even on metal-archives yet), formed by Tobias Dahs (King’s Winter, ex Living Abyss), but he’s joined by some notable guys in the scene: vocalist Christian Müller (Night In Gales) and drummer Hartmut Stoof (Gloryful, Symbiontic). And this is one of those rare […]

Band name from the early Grave demo and 4th album title – check. Intro song named “Into the Grave”- check. Gothic font logo- check. So I’ll give you one guess what the debut release from Ataraxy’s Santi Racaj sounds like? Yeah, though hailing from sunny Spain, this is 100%  Grave worship, so HM2 buzzing death […]

I’ve been trying to figure out how to start this review for Slagmaur and their fourth full-length album Hulders Ritual. The main reason I picked this album is that Black Metal luminary Snorre Ruch (Thorns), one of then liminaries who helped invent the Norwegian Black Metal style and forged a legacy borne in the fires […]

If you were listening to black metal in the mid-90s to the early 2000s, you might be familiar with Germany’s Solistitium Records. They were pretty productive in that time, releasing records from bands like Isvind, Helheim, Darkwoods My Betrothed, Tsjuder, Horna, and even Behemoth’s earlier albums. They went on hiatus in 2006, but reactivated in […]

I’m going to start this review with a gripe. In press materials for Sylosis’ new album, The New Flesh, main man Josh Middleton said something that I always sneer at. He stated that there’s not a lot of “good” metal out there nowadays. I think he meant that the mainstream type of metal I review […]

Long-running Floridian death metalers Monstrosity return with their seventh full-length album, Screams from Beneath the Surface. It’s been eight long years since they released their last album, The Passage of Existence, which was an amazing album, and I loved the artwork as well. The band has made some odd choices in album covers, such as […]

International brutal tech blackened/deathcore/death metal band Phasma, returns with their 3rd album – Purgatory. With six songs, the band goes the simple route. They name each tune with a Roman numeral. The first song starts with some growls, beatdown deathcore, then right into a terrific blast beat. The above explanation of the various genres the […]

Evolution is a necessity in the natural world. For any species to continue life, it has to continually reinvent itself, and since humans are the ultimate evolution, this includes Death Metal bands as well. See how I weaved that to be an introduction? Effortlessly. Anyway, today has brought me a promo for an album I’ve […]

After 4 albums on FDA Records, Germany’s Autopsy Worshipping duo, Slaughterday (an Autopsy song title for the newbies), has jumped to Testimony Records for album number 5, but that’s the only thing that has changed. While 2022s Tyrants of Doom added a cleaner, clearer sound and some other old school death metal dynamics to the […]

I’m going to be brutally honest, I’ve never listened to Party Cannon until now. Send any hate mail to the circular filing cabinet; I’m not kidding, though. This is my first time listening to these guys from always sunny Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. Do I like it? Yes, it is weird as fuck and extremely in-fucking-sane. […]

I quite enjoyed 2021’s Land of Darkness from this Greek (now relocated to Scotland) solo artist (‘Soulreaper’), but for some reason I missed 2024’s Echoes of Primordial Gnosis. So I thought I’d better get to this, his fifth album, before he drops another one. Now, I did listen to Echoes of Primordial Gnosis to be able to […]

I was all set to cover Distorted Reflection and their first album, Doom Rules Eternally, back in 2024, and then life happened, and I missed my window of opportunity. Since I don’t want that to happen again and also since Doom Zone is a pretty killer album, I’m jumping on it now. Living somewhere between […]

The last time we covered Poland’s Banisher was 2016’s Oniric Delusions, and it wasn’t me covering it. But considering I like Polish technical death metal, really, really liked Dormant Ordeal‘s Tooth and Nail from last year, AND saw the band has members that are or have been in/helped out the likes of some Polish heavy hitters […]

California’s long-running death grind outfit Exhumed returns with Red Asphalt, their ninth full-length album of original songs. I left out some of their covers/retrospective albums. The band has remained intact since 2018, and with Matt Harvey (vox/guitars), leading the charge, his band of goremongers- Ross Sewage (vox/bass), Mike Hamilton (drums), and Sebastian Phillips (guitars) return […]

After 2024s Hunger album, one of the best in the blackened deathcore genre of that year, there was a considerable shake-up in the Worm Shepherd camp, who were already functioning in a reduced capacity as a duo and some guests. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but original vocalist Duane Duarte was let go […]

Have you ever wondered how a combination of metalcore, Slipknot, and the nu metal stylings of Taproot would sound while recorded in a garbage can? Me neither. No disrespect to either of those bands (I have seen Taproot a few times and would again), but some musical stylings don’t work well and at times sound […]

There used to be a restaurant chain here in the States called Steak and Ale. They served traditional American food, a staple of the menu being meat and potatoes. No, this isn’t a review for A La Carte, it’s for Rogga Johansson and his main band Paganizer; I say ‘main’ because dude has a few […]